


Sleeping With Ghosts

by flutterjet



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Ambiguous Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 17:24:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20313238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flutterjet/pseuds/flutterjet
Summary: Nobody ever gets what they want in Ishgard.When Sidurgu’s parents came to its gates, they wanted refuge, a simple life of honest work and a warm home for their son to grow up in. Instead they’d found in Ishgard a cold winter and a colder blade, and their kid had found the abyss.(In which Sidurgu touches the Soul Crystal.)





	Sleeping With Ghosts

Nobody ever gets what they want in Ishgard.  
  
When Sidurgu’s parents came to its gates, they wanted refuge, a simple life of honest work and a warm home for their son to grow up in. Instead they’d found in Ishgard a cold winter and a colder blade, and their kid had found the abyss.

By some whim of the gods, the abyss hadn’t swallowed Sid - it had given him a mentor, a friend, a family. It hadn’t been what he wanted for himself, but it had been his life for the past ten years. He had started to think life could be good - he had started to _ want _ things again.  
  
He wanted to carry on his master’s mission and make Ishgard a better place with Fray. He wanted to be as good a Dark Knight as Fray was. He wanted to be with Fray, for as long as he could have him.

But Fray was gone, and Ishgard was the same cesspit it had ever been.

  
  
•••

  
  
Today, the sky is overcast - the looming threat of thunder growing larger within its heavy clouds, as unforgiving as the city below. 

Judging by the dark rings under their eyes and the way their gaze follows the jumping shadows within the Forgotten Knight, the Warrior of Light hasn’t been getting much sleep lately. Sidurgu does not know what haunts them, but it is a familiar kind of bleakness. 

When the Warrior turns down a drink but still lingers, stuck to the chair and apparently unwilling to go back to the Pillars, Sidurgu offers up his room - that is, he gracelessly grunts that his room is up for grabs, he’s not tired anyway. 

Rielle is happy to share, timidly mentioning that she has never had a real sleepover with a friend. She pauses, then adds that Sid doesn’t count. He isn’t offended.

He sits in the hallway with his sword and a blanket, too crowded by thoughts to even contemplate sleeping. In truth, he is happy to give up his bed - sleep is the land of wishes and wants, and happy dreams hurt more than unhappy ones. 

He’ll be content to watch over the Warrior as well as his charge, trying to find some purpose for his wake. 

He pointedly doesn’t _ think _about the last sleepless nights he spent in this very inn. Too short is the leap from thinking to feeling, and that is a door he will keep safely shut for as long as he can help it, barring it with all the considerable weight of his denial. 

He may have nodded off at some point - the sound of a glass crashing downstairs and some distant laughter reaches him from the Inn below and he jolts awake with a start, sword in hand. He’s about to sit back down when he sees something shine in the corner of his vision, as if it had been waiting for him to notice.  
  
“Needs to stop losing this thing...” Sid mutters, bending to pick up the Warrior’s - _ Fray’s _ \- soul crystal, innocuously laying on the dirty floor of the inn.  
  
He grabs it and his eyes open, though they already were, like two pairs of eyelids fluttering in the space of a breath. He blinks.  
  
It’s as if he had been sleepwalking until that moment, and the touch woke him with a start.  
  
The soul crystal feels incandescent - more real than most things Sid has seen and held in the past few weeks, more real than the supper he had today and the knight he gutted yesterday. It fits his hand better than his sword, it weighs and scalds in a good way. It feels more familiar than his own damn fingers, wrapped around a shard that should not be as warm as it feels.  
  
He bites his lip and lets his face crumple, alone in a barren hallway - with only the quivering shadows at the edge of the pool of light of his oil lamp as witness.  
  
But he’s not quite alone, not when he tightens his fist around the crystal. It feels uncannily nostalgic, an aether he hasn’t felt in months and he has missed with every waking moment.  
  
Maybe if he believes hard enough - if he _ prays _ to something, anything....  
  
_ “Reckon that’s not how it works, heh.” _  
  
“Nobody knows how these things truly work,” he bites back, a man talking to himself in the night.  
  
The shadow of his beloved friend is sitting as he used to, one leg bent and the other leg straight, gloved hand propped on his raised knee. Sid can probably see the dust motes through and behind him if he squints, so he stubbornly looks away.  
  
”About time I lost it, I suppose.” 

An eerie chuckle in reply, and the voice coalesces in his mind and ears. _ “That comes with the job description, one would think.” _

“Why can’t I see your face?” If the hallucination is intent on staying, Sid thinks, he might as well challenge it a bit.  
  
_ “Don’t have much of one anymore. But this is your dream, so it’s up to you.” _  
  
“I want..” Sid licks dry lips and swallows. It’s hard to even say it out loud when he knows it’s not meant to be. “I want to see you.”

‘Fray’ stands up and approaches, without a sound - but then again he was quiet in life, as well, and Sid can fool himself into thinking his hand won’t pass through. 

He reaches up to remove a helmet made of shadow, to reveal more shadow beneath. Hollowed cheeks and sunken eyes, but then Fray always had the look of a starveling, so in the dim light it’s not so different.  
  
He looks almost real - and his aether feels real. That defiant, assertive darkness that Fray wove in coils and garlands around his precise stances, so much more beautiful than Sid’s own. 

_ “Happy now?” _ Even as a ghost, he smirks in that way of his and Sid’s heart hurts with longing.

“Close enough,” he grunts, because he’d never admit it even if he were, only for reality to come crashing in. 

Sid has a fleeting, mad desire to abscond with the crystal - he wants to put it under his armor and carry it over his heart as a shield, to protect what can’t be mended. 

He _ wants_, wants Fray to stay. 

He allows himself a moment of weakness, entertaining the thought.  
  
But he has a job to do. The Warrior of Light has a job to do. Fray has a job to do. Even if his aether were strong enough to do what the Warrior of Light’s can, it would hardly be the pragmatic or sensible thing to do. Fray would chide him, and he doesn’t even need to be here for Sid to hear his laugh.

_ “Don’t go summoning ghosts. It’ll do you no good, assuming you even could.” _

“Shut up, don’t you think I know that?” Sid rears his head back, needled in what’s left of his pride. Curse him - as if he hadn’t learned anything from Myste’s shenanigans.

Silence follows, as if the ghost heeded his order - his badly concealed plea. Sid bows his head, shame and helpless anger and even deeper anguish twisting his features. He doesn’t want the ghost of Fray to see himself reflected in teary eyes. 

“I miss you,” he says, to the dark. To the lost. 

There’s no answer, because nothing a ghost could say would help.

“How do I keep doing this by myself?” Sid can allow his voice to waver, if nobody is there to hear it.  
  
_ “Justice demands no less.’” _

He chokes on a wry laugh, because of course he’d say that if he were here.

Just when he feels the mortifying warmth of unspent tears pressing behind his eyelids, when he thinks the vision will end if he opens his eyes again, Fray touches him. 

Fray’s gauntlet doesn’t press on his hand when it lays on it, and Sid wishes it weighed as it used to, held him in place as it used to. But he can feel something in his aether, whatever it is, and it feels right. 

“I take you’ve figured it out, at last,” Fray says, and there’s the benign condescension of one that was always the better student, but never bragged about it. “The flame in the Abyss.”

Sid fixes his tremulous gaze on the soul crystal gripped in his hand, held in turn by Fray’s semi-transparent fist. He can almost see it through his fingers, the flame burning inside the crystal.

“I have,” he eventually replies, voice rough. “But… ” _ Late _, as always - late for everything. 

“That’s it,” Fray is smiling, even in the shade. “‘My flame. Your flame. Nothing has changed. You but need to let it breathe - I’ll be downright furious if I you let it go out.” 

Sid can’t answer, because he’s tongue tied and knows he’ll let his feelings spill like a cascade if he says another word. Instead, he reaches a hand out to the beloved darkness.

Fray’s shade melds with his own as he moves closer, close enough to embrace.

Sid kisses air, but the pressure against his heart is as real as he remembers--

At once, his body is overtaken by a bone-deep tiredness, not unlike the times he spent all of his admittedly limited magical resources. 

He wishes he could be selfish - but nobody ever gets what they wish for in Ishgard. 

He swallows his wishes and sits back down to wait for dawn, the crystal sitting next to him on the rough floor.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you @goodnyte for betaing! Shoutout to the DRK discord for being thirsty and angsty. :)


End file.
